February 29th, 2016

Jonathan Lyons, Assistant Professor, College Core Curriculum Three brothers—eldest, middle, youngest—the middle brother bookended by two siblings who are cases of failures of birth control: • The eldest arrives in 1967; • he is 13 months ahead of the middle brother; • he is four years and nine months ahead of the youngest. Three brothers whose first home is located on Bryant Street in Waterloo, Iowa, said home being formerly the childhood home of the brothers’ mother. The eldest will later, as an adult, calculate the timing of his conception and learn that his mother, who was sixteen at the […]

February 29th, 2016

Jonathan Lyons, Assistant Professor, College Core Curriculum This is a special, limited-edition of the Journal of Experimental Fiction, featuring experimental fictions constructed on coasters (the kind for glasses) and delivered in cheese boxes. “Sore Eel Cheese by the Flakxus Group.” Journal of Experimental Fiction, special edition.

Chris Boyatzis, Professor of Psychology A growing body of literature indicates a modestly positive association between religiosity and spirituality as predictors of psychological health (anxiety and depression), suggesting they serve as personal resiliency factors. The purpose of this study was to expand our understanding of the relationships among these constructs. Using Lazarus’s Transactional Model of Stress as a theoretical framework, we examined: (a) the extent to which spirituality and religiosity mediated and/or moderated the association between perceived stress and psychological health and (b) whether there was a moderated (religiosity) mediation (spirituality) between stress and health. The Perceived Stress Scale, Daily […]

At times, the academy seems devoid of justice because it emphasizes the cultivation of knowledge often denied to marginalized individuals and communities. As black queer feminist scholars doing praxis-driven theorizing from separate fields on the subject of black queer families and communities, we employ research methods that resist the dynamics of power and privilege that exist within normative researcher-participant exchanges. In this essay, we explore and highlight the ethical, justice-oriented, and dialogical relationship between researcher-scholars and research participants. Through story and theory, we illustrate and argue that autoethnographies and narrative interviews can act as epistemological excavation tools for both researchers and participants, as they become sites of individual and collective consciousness. Our work resists capitalist models of research and instead promotes a justice-oriented and community-derived building of knowledge.

Linking socioeconomic and personal transformations, recent scholarship on neoliberalism in East and Southeast Asia has examined the role of various emotional experiences in reconfiguring selfhood toward values of personal responsibility and self-care. However, studies rarely focus on how such experiences come to be understood as specifically emotional themselves. In this article, I examine the growing use of emotion (cam xuc)as a conceptual category to define the self and everyday life in a psychologistic idiom among middle-class residents of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. While more established discourses of sentiment (tinh cam) define selfhood in relation to notions of obligation and care, the emerging model of emotion emphasizes individuated self-knowledge. However, instead of replacing sentiment, newer understandings of emotion have developed alongside and in relation to sentiment. In categorizing various feelings as explicitly “emotional” in nature, people participate in a self-fashioning project that cultivates an emotionally aware and expressive self that is informed by neoliberal sensibilities yet does not supplant socialist or Confucian models of selfhood. I argue that emotions are not only central to the subjective experience of the transition to a market-oriented economy but also that emotion as a category itself is a medium through which economic transformations reorganize selfhood more generally. [emotion, self, neoliberalism, ethnopsychology, Vietnam]

Participation in extracurricular activities is associated with positive youth outcomes such as higher education attainment and greater future earnings. We present new analyses of four national longitudinal surveys of American high school students that reveal a sharp increase in the class gap in extracurricular involvement. Since the 1970s, upper-middle-class students have become increasingly active in school clubs and sport teams, while participation among working-class students has veered in the opposite direction. These growing gaps have emerged in the wake of rising income inequality, the introduction of pay to play programs, and increasing time and money investments by upper-middle-class parents in children’s development. These trends need to be taken into account in any new initiative to monitor mobility. They also present a challenge to the American ideal of equal opportunity insofar as participation in organized activities shapes patterns of social mobility.

Snellman, Kaisa; Silva, Jennifer; Frederick, Carl B.; and Putnam, Robert D. “The Engagement Gap: Social Mobility and Extracurricular Participation among American Youth.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 657, no. 1 (2015) : 194-207.

Comments Off on Jennifer Silva – Snellman, Kaisa; Silva, Jennifer; Frederick, Carl B.; and Putnam, Robert D. “The Engagement Gap: Social Mobility and Extracurricular Participation among American Youth.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 657, no. 1 (2015) : 194-207.

Much work has been done in recent decades to emphasize the need in ethnographic writing to grapple with questions of authorship, perspective, aesthetics, emotional resonance, and style. Various forms of reflexive ethnographic writing, and especially autoethnography, have opened up new expressive avenues. In this article, I argue that a figure who is at present poorly known in English-language social scientific circles, the French ethnographer, poet, and writer Michel Leiris (1901-1990), pushes this kind of autobiographical ethnographic writing forward in powerful ways. In brief, Leiris offers a powerfully effective method (which I call poesie auto-socioanalytique) that ties subjective experience into a larger objective structural framework via a method that (1) focuses on cultural meaning in an autobiographical experiential framework, that is, from the inside, (2) is expressly concerned with the role that language itself plays in meaning and memory, and (3) examines extraordinary situations in which one stands, temporarily, outside the normal interactional world in an existential frame of peculiar intensity and effervescence (the ek-static), and uses the Durkheimian conception of the sacred-profane opposition, along with the binary differentiation of the sacred into pure and impure varieties, as a structural theoretical tool for these descriptions. He makes an important contribution to ongoing discussions in the disciplines of cultural anthropology and cultural sociology concerning the interpretation and description of cultural meaning.

Differences in social advantage significantly influence health conditions and life expectancy within any population. Such factors reproduce historic class, race, and ethnic disparities in community success. Few populations in the United States face more social and economic disadvantage than farmworkers, and farmworker housing has significant potential to ameliorate or amplify the health impact of those disadvantages. Drawing on the limited direct research on farmworkers, and on additional research about poor, isolated, and immigrant societies, we propose four mechanisms through which housing can be expected to affect farmworker health: quality of social capital within farmworker communities, stress effects of poor housing situations, effects of housing on social support for healthy behaviors, and interactions among these factors, especially effects on children that can last for generations. Policy and planning definitions of “adequate” farmworker housing should take a more holistic view of housing needs to support specific social and community benefits in design decisions.

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides an opportunity for undergraduate students to observe and experience first-hand changing social policies and their impacts for individuals and communities. This article overviews an action research and teaching project developed at an undergraduate liberal arts university and focused on providing ACA enrollment assistance as a way to support student engagement with community health. The project was oriented around education, enrollment and evaluation activities in the community, and students and faculty together reflected on and analyzed the experiences that came from the research and outreach project. Student learning centered around applying concepts of diversity and political agency to health policy and community health systems. Students reported and faculty observed an unexpected empowerment for students who were able to use their university-learned critical thinking skills to explain complex systems to a wide range of audiences. In addition, because the project was centered at a university with no health professions programs, the project provided students interested in community and public health with the opportunity to reflect on how health and access to health care is conditioned by social context. The structure and pedagogical approaches and implications of the action research and teaching project is presented here as a case study for how to engage undergraduates in questions of community and public health through the lens of health policy and community engagement.

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